Businesses of every size are using SMS activation to boost engagement with local customers. According to Forbes, at least 9 out of 10 consumers prefer to text local businesses. More customers prefer personalized communication with local companies, making voice, SMS, live chat, and email essential to every business that wants to compete.
As a developer, you can use an SMS API to easily and effectively integrate text messaging into your business or client’s software. When you partner with the right cloud-based communication platform, you can implement a seamless communication strategy for your client or business, ensuring an enhanced customer experience.
In today’s world, SMS has become a necessity for businesses, offering many advantages. Organizations can improve interactions with users and customers, automate messaging, and enjoy the high open rates and response rates of SMS. So how can you select the ideal SMS provider to implement the messaging service and features your company or client needs? Let’s take a closer look, with examples and more on what to consider when selecting a cloud-based SMS platform.
Why Is SMS Activation a Necessity in the Modern Business Landscape?
Customers demand convenient interactions with local businesses, and there are few channels more convenient than text messaging. Implementing SMS into your client or company’s software and systems can help the organization reach new customers and retain business. SMS implementation delivers the following benefits to its users.
Omnichannel Support
While voice and email support are critical to many businesses, an omnichannel approach with messaging, chat, voice, and email is invaluable. Customers gain a personalized experience that allows them to select the most convenient method of communication. Many consumers prefer to receive text messages from their favorite businesses and will even engage in conversation using SMS. An omnichannel approach to customer support and service can help your client or business retain customers with fast and personalized communication.
Improved Customer Experience
In addition to providing more ways for customers to keep in touch with the business, the personalized nature of text messaging improves the overall experience. Customers can quickly and conveniently contact the company and receive updates and promotions when they opt in. Organizations can also set up appointment reminders and confirmation texts for their clients, making the customer feel appreciated and valued. It allows your client or business to build a better customer relationship while efficiently providing support and service.
Higher Open Rates and Engagement
Text messaging offers exceptional open rates and a substantial increase in rates of responses from customers compared to email. According to a report in Forbes, text messaging delivers open rates of up to 98% and nearly 45% response rates. Compared to email campaigns, your business or client’s text messaging campaigns will receive significantly more engagement, ensuring the company gets more desirable results from its marketing efforts.
Making Improvements Through Customer Feedback
The elevated open and response rates of SMS make text messaging an ideal method of requesting feedback and surveys from customers. An SMS activation can help your client or business reach out to customers after a sale or service to evaluate their satisfaction. It can help the business pinpoint issues and inefficiencies to improve the next customer interaction. Reaching out to consumers also builds a sense of loyalty as they feel their opinions are valuable to the business.
Automation and Self Service
SMS is an ideal communication technology for automation. Customers can reliably use your business or client’s SMS activation to get an automated response from an app or website or by sending a message. Similar to automating feedback surveys, you can implement automated features to enhance customer service, such as authentication for logging in to apps and websites and appointment reminders sent through SMS.
How Can You Integrate SMS Activation for Your Client or Business?
Organizations use SMS in various ways to facilitate fast and seamless communication. The most efficient way for a developer to integrate messaging into a business or client’s systems is through an SMS application programming interface (API).
As a developer, you likely already know an API is a software interface that facilitates communication between multiple systems or software. An SMS API allows you to implement messaging for your business or client and provides a simplified configuration of the services and features the business requires.
Related: What Is the Purpose of Investing in Business Messaging Platforms?
Messaging another person from a mobile device or person-to-person (P2P) messaging is as simple as picking up a working phone and sending a message. However, application-to-person (A2P) messaging is often more challenging.
If you are implementing an automated messaging system into an app or sending messages in bulk through an SMS API, it will use A2P messaging. Carriers can block high volumes of messages sent as P2P as spam. A2P messaging is only for businesses approved by a carrier using 10-digit long-code (10DLC) or toll-free numbers.
A reputable communication partner will provide approved A2P messaging for your client or business, avoiding gray routes and aggregators that send messages as P2P to avoid international fees. Gray routes and aggregators can result in blocked numbers, poor delivery, and legal issues that make critical SMS applications unreliable.
Common Examples of SMS for Business
Businesses use SMS in various ways to improve the customer experience and provide seamless support and services. You can implement SMS into your company or client’s software to activate the following benefits.
Multifactor Authentication
Multifactor authentication is a common method of authenticating login credentials as a secondary level of security for sensitive data. It sends a text message to the phone number registered with the account or service and is used throughout various industries. For instance, financial institutions, email providers, and social media platforms use multifactor authentication to protect sensitive user data from unauthorized users.
Appointment Reminders
Appointment reminders are invaluable to service industries. Professionals such as doctors, dentists, hair stylists, mechanics, and sales agents use appointment reminders to message clients and patients, ensuring they are more likely to arrive on time. It reduces costly no-shows and gives clients a chance to reschedule, allowing the business to plan ahead.
An appointment reminder can contain a link to reschedule online or ask the client to reply to confirm or cancel their appointment. For example, a dental clinic can send patients a reminder 24 hours before their appointment with a link to reschedule if necessary. It allows the dental clinic to fill the appointment slot with another client and offer a new schedule to the initial patient.
Feedback and Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Businesses can use SMS to automate feedback and customer satisfaction surveys, ensuring all customers who opt in receive a message to provide their feedback. Feedback and surveys help the company calibrate customer service and deliver products that appeal to clients and meet their needs. For example, a delivery service may send an SMS survey to the sender and recipient to determine if the delivery was a success and what could be improved next time.
Click-to-Message
Integrating click-to-message into an app or website offers users a fast and convenient way to reach the company for support or service through messaging. According to HubSpot, more than half of all internet users shop from mobile devices, meaning your users are likely accessing your website or app from an SMS-capable device. An SMS activation allows you to add this helpful feature, making communication with customers and users seamless.
Phone Number Masking
Phone number masking is critical to ensure privacy when users are messaging each other using dating, ride-sharing, and delivery apps. When you enable this feature as part of your client or company’s SMS activation, users can message other users or delivery drivers while maintaining a comfortable level of privacy by concealing their phone numbers.
What to Look for in an SMS Platform
While a cloud-based communication platform can deliver reliable messaging for your company or client, finding the right partner is crucial to enhancing business communications and seamlessly implementing messaging. Consider the following to select an ideal messaging partner.
Simple API Integration
While some businesses need a custom API, most will benefit from the simplicity and efficiency of using a pre-made SMS API from a reputable cloud-based communication platform. An API can reduce your work from hours of coding and testing to just a few lines of code.
Related: SMS API: How Can Your Business Benefit From Text Messaging Solutions?
When you choose a reliable SMS activation partner, the API is already tested and ready for implementation. You can have your client or company’s messaging capabilities ready in minutes and port phone numbers from another carrier quickly.
Documentation
An ideal SMS partner will have documentation to help you implement and configure the SMS API to your business or client’s satisfaction. When searching the communication platform’s website, look for a dedicated resource section containing the following:
- Software development kits (SDKs)
- Use case articles
- Quick starts for implementing microservices from Docker containers
- Code examples
An exceptional API provider will offer resources in your preferred programming language, such as Ruby, Python, and PHP, making integration with your existing code seamless.
Security and Maintenance
Security can be a major concern for APIs since they face the public internet and often carry mission-critical data. With an increasing number of API attacks, it is essential to keep APIs up-to-date to avoid costly data breaches. A survey conducted by Salt Security found that just over 10% of respondents updated their APIs daily, and 31% updated them weekly. A reputable SMS API provider will maintain a secure and updated API with a version control system like GitHub to ensure your client or business uses the most recent API release.
Boost Local Engagement with a Reliable Text Messaging Service
Text messaging allows a business to deliver personalized communication to customers and users. The organization can benefit from more options for consumers to conveniently contact the business and higher open rates and responses for important text message marketing campaigns. You can make implementing messaging simple with an ideal SMS partner.
Flowroute is a business messaging platform that ensures your organization’s mission-critical messages are reliably sent and received. We offer 24/7 availability and 99.999% uptime to guarantee delivery. You have the scalability and resilience of our HyperNetwork™ with zero gray routes and aggregators to ensure your business or client’s messages reach their destination. Get started with our reliable business text messaging APIs to begin developing SMS solutions for your company or clients.
